Literature and Politics from a microcosm called Delaware. Here all the multifaceted players across the great capitalist contradiction are reduced to a few actors: a handful of banking and chemical oligarchs squatting in châteaux, a stable of artists downwind who either take inspiration for amnesia and roses or take a stand, challenging the living to repair a polluted world.

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Just out with new preface, 2nd Edition of Autoplant: A Poetic Monologue

"writes with authority and insight into the factory world. He brings his lively cast of characters to life, puts us there with them on the job. The book is funny, irreverent, and touching." Jim Daniels

Untime, by Steven Leech

"Through the parallel universes unveiled in UNTIME, the reader begins to clearly see the world they live in for the first time." -Lynnette Shelley, Brandywine Valley Weekly

The Mother Earth Inn

Neocons and neoliberals party on while Andean Indigenous evolve toward revolution in a country a lot like Ecuador

Pinhead #5

In the The Wedgehorn Manifesto, Steven Leech advocates preserving the legacy of Delaware literature, especially that which was produced by Wilmington authors. It exposes the flaws in today’s environment and suggests remedies for a cultural revival.

Saturday, September 29, 2012

A Personal Invitation from Phillip Bannowsky

Dear friends in arts, factories,
and politics,

About twenty-five years ago, when
I was a rank-and-file activist in the UAW and humping the assembly line at
Chrysler, I discovered a rare young poet, Jim Daniels, who seemed to understand
the dreams and difficulties of us autoworkers. Now he is coming to Delaware,
and I hope all my friends and union brothers and sisters will come out to see
him when he reads at 5 p.m. October 11th at UD’s Gore Hall in Room 116. Also, he
will be joining my old friend and long serving former Delaware Poet Laureate,
e. jean lanyon at the 30th Anniversary Celebration of 2nd
Saturday Poets, 5 p.m., October 13th, at the Jackson Inn, 101 N.
DuPont Road in Wilmington. Both events are open to the public. UD is free; 2nd
Saturday requests a $5 donation, and the Jackson Inn, as a tavern, serves only
over 21.

Jim Damiels

Daniels seemed to be living my
dream. While I dropped out of UD in 1965 and hired on at Chrysler in 69, Daniels
escaped early on from Ford to work at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has
taught creative writing since 1981. Now he has written, edited, and produced
over thirty works of poetry, fiction, and film, and he has won numerous awards.
By the way, he wrote a generous blurb for the back cover of my Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue. He has
read in countless union halls, universities, libraries, bars, and bookstores
since 1978. One of his poems, “Factory Love,” from Places/Everyone, is decaled on the roof of race car driver Alex
Gabau’s sports car: “Machine, I come to you 800 times a day/like a crazy monkey
lover.”

I stayed at Chrysler, (except for
1992-95 on leave to teach in Ecuador) until I retired in 2001, and now I teach
at the University of Delaware. I am proud to say I have had a role in bringing
my old favorite to Newark and Wilmington. A big thanks is due for funding to
UD’s English Department, the Faculty Senate, and the Delaware Humanities Forum.
But it is not only pride that a feel, but a sort of vindication.

You see, my present employer, the
University of Delaware, purchased the Chrysler Newark Assembly Plant (N.A.P.) site
to use for its new Science,
Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus and for Bloom Energy. Ironically,
UD had featured prominently in my Autoplant
as the dream “gymnasium” from which I wandered in the late 60s across South
College Avenue to Chrysler’s assembly line.

What had been hometown to so many
Chrysler workers is now history. Now, history can either be a corpse treated to
an academic post mortem or a living memory recounted in the poet’s imagination.
Chrysler N.A.P wasn’t just so much private property; it was the site of our human
drama and the embodiment of our creativity and sweat.

Photo by Harry Rohrer: Chrysler N.A.P Body-In-White

That’s how worklife appears in
Jim Daniel’s poetic world: human and sweaty. Sometimes it highlights the inherent
dignity in a bottom job. In “Short-order Cook,” for example, from Places/Everyone, when the narrator gets
an order for “thirty cheeseburgers and thirty fries,” he deftly if frantically
crowds thirty patties onto the grill, flips them, ads the cheese, builds them
on buns, cooks two buckets of fries, wraps them all, bags the order, wipes his
sweat, smiles at the counter girls, eats a handful of ice, and proceeds to

do a little
dance and walk back to the grill.

Pressure,
responsibility, success,

thirty
cheeseburgers, thirty fries.

Other times the dignity comes
harder. Digger is an autoworker whose troubles Daniels writes about in dozens
of poems published across three decades. In “Digger Thinks About Numbers,” also
from Places, our hero contemplates
his contribution to the tally of cars built in Detroit on a big sign above the
freeway. The poet speaks to Digger, noting how he wishes the sign said,

“Digger made
160,000 parts so far this year.”

You want your
neighbor to come over

and congratulate
you. But

he ties brake
cables—he’d want a sign too.

Diego Rivera, 1927, Detroit Institute of Arts.

Daniels’ heroes aren’t just
working out their place in the work place, but in their homes and in the
spiritual order as well. Niagara Falls
is a longer poem about a man on vacation with his family at the famous site.
His mind drifts back to the hardscrabble existence of his parents, his Catholic
upbringing, the prayers he learned and forgot, the perverted priest and the one
who smoked pot, a shrunken head at Ripley’s Museum, Elvis, St. Francis of
Assisi, feeding bread to an insatiable multitude of carp, and a recurring motif
about a restaurant called Mama Something’s, where he got a bad case of heartburn.
The poem ends by evoking that glimpse of grace that may be the best we can pray
for:

We are carp
swimming up river, Mama,

all of us,
even you. I hold the steering wheel

in one hand.
The other rests

on my wife’s
knee. My wallet against my ass

tells me
little about who I am.

It is the
prayer book this world insists on.

The sound of
the tires hisses in my ears

like rushing
water.

If I was a
saint, I might

scoop out my
dashboard full of change

and toss it to
the wind.

But I am
counting it out

to pay my
toll.

One of the most tragic poems is “Abandoned,
Detroit,” from In Line for the
Exterminator. The narrator and his dad take a ride to see if the house they
and his great-grandfather lived in was still standing. They

detour down

Benitau, slowing
to look for the crumbling heap

of recognizable
memory, then blowing through

stop signs back
to the freeway.

He reminisces about the Great
Flood of Detroit, with

everybody

pitching in to
clean up the sewage in each other’s basement,

nobody talking
about whose shit it was.

And Daniels leaves us with a
final image of Motor City grief:

Ragged Flakes of
lead paint, yellow and brown,

seeping into the
hallowed ground where our dead

were laid out,
then carried across the street

to the church
that is also no more. My heart’s

a wrecking ball,
okay? I’m swinging away

at my holy
places of abandonment.

I’m thinking
about bricks as seeds.

I’m dreaming the
dull sad eye

of the
streetlight.

Jim Daniels shares many of our
values of working class dignity, art for the people, and human rights. I hope
to see you at the University, October 11 or at 2nd Saturday’s on
October 13.

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Broken Turtle Booklist is a catalogue of Delaware regional authors, local publishers, and literary communities operating in Delaware. The Booklist includes audio and video recordings of Delaware authors, as well as their major works. It provides easy links to Amazon, Paypal, or publishers for folks who want to buy. Each month, we will feature a selected work by a Delaware author.

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To get your free copy of Steven Leech's The Wedgehorn Manifesto, write us at publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com. Also, Leech is now making a number of his other works in new editions available in PDF format.

What others have been saying about The Wedgehorn Manifesto:

Leech's writer's voice is from the heart, carrying lots of knowledge without pretension. He has a poets's feel for the way words work, and a jounalist's sense of the significant. Wedgehorn Manifesto marks, I hope, a turning point in the effort to preserve from destruciton the habitat in our collective memory of the many talented story tellers, poets, picture makers, and musicians who helped make life bearable for innumerable ordinary folk, and in fact made possible the fine cuture of the luckier few.

-Jonathan Bragdon, Wilmington born artist now living in Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Wedgehorn Manifesto is a call to action, a demand, an impassioned plea for the recognition, respect, and support of Delaware's artistic cultural past, present and future.

-Pat gibbs, columnist, The Wilmington SPECTATOR

Now Available!

Dreamstreets showcased progressive artists, photographers, and writers of the Delaware Valley from 1977 to 2006. A beautiful record of the most vital—if often marginalized—cultural productions of an era. Features two centuries of Delaware's literary heritage. Now includes audio and video files.